The Other Side
by AshleyKay
Summary: Hairspray 2007. There are two sides to every story, Link tells his. Introspective. Trink
1. Prologue of Sorts

He looks back sometimes and can't believe how close they always were. A flowery scent that he wouldn't know until years later belonged to her, a whisper of her name before it was the only thing he could ever remember, and of course the hint, a shadow really, of the face that would become more important to him than even his own.

Tracy always says it starts in the weeks before the Miss Hairspray pageant, but Link knows it began before that, back when he was more than a little selfish, before he cared about what was right. He says it started in Jr. high, when his mom died and his dad began to waste away in well lit room with his cigarettes and his scotch and his distilled memories. When Link learned that being noticed ment winks and girls and a swivel of his hips. When the shadow of his mothers pearls began to fade and was replaced with an empty kitchen and a quiet house. It starts then because thats the first time Link remembers a thin whisp of her face, nothing big just a shared lunch, a simple excuse about her mom packing to much and even though he should have been use to the way no one ever packed him anything anymore. It never became normal or easy and seemed only to become more confusing with the vastness of empty time. So now when he thinks of it he's embarrassed that he promptly forgot the curve of her face and the tilt of her smile. Though he never could forget the richness of her eyes.

There are of course moments between then and now, but to Link they are rushed together and hazy, like she were nothing more than a ghost. How her name came up ever now and then especially with Amber gossiping about anything that was different or new, but he had stopped caring when his father did, had stopped trying when the smell of old imported booze was more comforting than his poor dead mothers' pies.

The years between his mothers death and the day Tracy Turnblad caught his eye in detention were like dreams, he remembers them but they are years of blueish haze and everything looks too bright and contrast to be real. Tracy woke him up, she changed more than the face of television, she changed him. She taught him to be a man, not a boy playing rock star. The way there lives worked out was nothing like he had imagined years ago, but somehow it was all the better. So when someone asks how they met he lets Tracy tell it but when she's through and the guest leaves or the asker drifts away, he always retells the tale, just so she'll know. She may have seen him first and loved him first, but she was a part of him for just as long.


	2. Tell a Tale of A Heart that's True

It's almost three years to the day the first time he hears Tracy tell of how they got together. There sitting with her aunt Mildred and her12ohsoadorable cats, one of them MilesorPeppyorMrWiskers stares at him from across the room, while he holds Tracy's hand and lets the rough cool circle of the engament band remind him of how things are going to turn out. When Mildred leaves to put the tea on he can't help but turn to Tracy and tell her about how things were from the other side.

He tells her of a time before, when selfishness and hairspray were just things that he had no sense of, when white pearls and father knows best were the easy reminders of safety and trust. This is long before Amber and could have been big breaks and Corny, it was so long and far away from Tracy that Link almost squints when he thinks of it. It's hard sometimes for Link to think of the things that were pre-Tracy, mostly because he feels as if his whole life is defined in eras Pre-Mother's death and Post-Tracy Turnblad, their are so many years missing, so much time that is expaned with uslessness and not quite greed but something that shames him all the same. Tracy just stares at him when his eyes go downcast and he feels like trembling, she is the only one who would ever see him this way, because he is always afraid that one day she look over and see him. Not the Link that she saw in black and white with an upturned lip and crouners style, but that she'll see the things he was before she literally dance her way into his life. He fears she will look and she the barbed wire like jokes and cruelty that he didn't feel but he particpated in all the same. That she'll see like he has, that takeing no action is the same as fighting side by side with the Von Tussles of the world. That it wasn't till he met her, that he found out that there was so much more to being a good person besides being good looking. But she never fails him, never lets him down, she simply smiles and takes his hand. So he tells her, tells her about another woman that would define him and shape him, another woman from so long ago that he has trouble recallng the exact shade of her eyes. But he tells Tracy, because there is no one else that matters so much, he tells her about the softness of his mother's hands and the way that he was brought up to be good and kind and genorous to a fault but somehow everything Lilla Larkin taught him, seemed to still and fall away when she died.


End file.
